ANPR

Welcome to Big Brother Watch in 2018. We’ve already been given an idea of some of the key surveillance threats to the public’s privacy and civil liberties to come over the next year: the Surveillance Camera Commissioner, Tony Porter, has published his Annual Report for 2016/17. The Surveillance Camera Commissioner’s Report reveals an expanding of […]

Today the Surveillance Camera Commissioner published his 2015/16 Annual Report. It drives home the large number of technologies his office must keep an eye on, such as; CCTV, ANPR, body worn video and drones, as well as demonstrating the growing number of new and emerging surveillance technologies which will require proper debate and scrutiny. The […]

A single case has managed to combine all that is worrying about the way in which local councils carry out traffic enforcement. The story, reported in the Daily Mail, showed that after being caught on CCTV a driver was subsequently tracked down by bailiffs using a combination of mobile Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) and […]

You may remember the now infamous “ring of steel” system of ANPR cameras that was placed around Royston, which was ruled to be unlawful by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). A year on from that ruling, figures have been published which show that since Hertfordshire Police was forced to dismantle the system there hasn’t been […]

In the past three years, 294 public organisations have faced action over their use of the database containing details of car registrations and driving licenses. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Big Brother Watch, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) disclosed that the organisations were overwhelmingly local authorities, but included […]